On The Miserable Road: The Poetry of I-95

Inspired by I-95: A.R. Ammons was on I-95 when he saw the inspiration for one of his most decorated works.

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Interstate 95 inspires more than just four-letter words, it turns out.

Twenty five years ago, poet A.R. Ammons and his wife were driving home from a visit with family in South Miami. Somewhere north of Dade County -- on I-95 -- Ammons looked out his window and there it was: one of South Florida’s infamous mountains of trash.

Garbage: A Poem was born.

garbage has to be the poem of our time becausegarbage is spiritual, believable enough

to get our attention, getting in the way, pilingup, stinking, turning brooks brownish and

creamy white: what else deflects us from theerrors of our illusionary ways...

(beginning of section two of Garbage: A Poem)

Garbage is a 121-page-long poem that won Ammons some of the top prizes in poetry, including the 1993 National Book Award.

While Ammons himself wasn’t from South Florida, the origin story for Garbage does illustrate something interesting about the life poetic in South Florida.

“One of the things you do as a poet is you write about the landscape around you,” says poet P. Scott Cunningham, who runs the O, Miami poetry festival happening all this month. “But I think the dilemma you have as a poet in contemporary Miami is that a lot of the landscape that you’re exposed to everyday is from your car.”

Along with O, Miami, WLRN is asking for your poems about places that mean something to you in our This Is Where poetry contest. The poems must contain the phrase “this is where.”

And they certainly do not have to be about I-95 -- after all, that is where most of us lose our minds -- unless you’re Victoria Warren Jackson, a teacher and writer who lives in Miami Gardens, works in Coral Gables and is stuck in rush-hour 95 traffic both to and from work.

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Trooper Joe Sanchez has a problem with the 95 Express lanes. Going about 60 MPH in the express lanes, he pulls his Florida Highway Patrol SUV within inches of the median and comes to a full stop. He’s technically on the 95 Express shoulder.

There’s a good chance you’ve seen the work of Elisabeth Hassett and an equally good chance you didn’t really notice it. Hassett is the landscape architect for the Florida Department of Transportation’s District 4, which includes Broward and Palm Beach Counties. When there’s a need for highway-side landscape design, Hassett has almost definitely had a hand in choosing the plants and the layout -- a far more complicated art than you might imagine.

“Lexus lanes” may have been too cheap for Miami. This past Saturday morning, South Florida drivers traded in for “Lamborghini lanes.”

The maximum possible toll on the 95 Express lanes increased from $7.00 to $10.50 — the mininum has doubled to 50 cents — in response to record numbers of motorists forking over what was thought to be a discouragingly high amount of money.

“That day you paid seven bucks, we were trying to get you not to go there,” said Rory Santana, who oversees Miami-Dade County’s stretch of 95 Express for the Florida Department of Transportation.

In 1990, when we were both 22 years old, my friend Clark and I drove from New Jersey to the Canadian border, bought a box of donuts, turned the car around, and drove the entire length of the southbound Interstate 95 non-stop, as quickly as possible. It was what we called a “high-velocity vacation."

For reasons unclear we decided to only listen to one song the entire way: Madonna’s “Like A Prayer.” We had the cassingle.